Queering Personhood in the Neo-Slave Narrative: Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories

Abstract

This article uses the explorations of antebellum black gender and sexuality in Jewelle Gomez’s neo-slave narrative The Gilda Stories (1991) to reconsider what Hortense Spillers has called the “neuter-bound” status of black gender and sexuality during slavery. Spillers’s work finds whiteness to be enacted through penetration of the enslaved and blackness to be neuter/neutered, meaning both gender indeterminate and incapable of penetration. Unfortunately, this schema conflates gender indeterminacy with impotency and lack of agency, thereby framing gender indeterminacy as a social condition incompatible with liberation. My reading of The Gilda Stories seeks to move critical conversation of antebellum gender and sexuality into queer- and transpositive territory by disentangling gender-indeterminacy from its associations with impotency and reframing it as a powerful resource of resistance and survival not only for enslaved people, but for postbellum African Americans as well.